To be honest, I feel that the topic starter has it the wrong way around. Although I like Travis and found his story to be fairly interesting, I wasn't thrilled by it (I found it to be a little too... expected, I guess). I think I would've been happy enough if it was absent and the cult side of things was focused on more, especially considering the game title. (As for Alessa herself, I didn't like this version of her that much.)

OMG she does look like young Travis with a wig. lol. But, yeah, I agree, Alessa didn't need to be in the game. I don't think it should be called Origins. It should have been Silent Hill 5, then Homecoming could be Silent Hill 6, SM would be SH 7 and then the up and coming Silent Hill 8 would make sense.

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If they had explored his story a bit better, then yeah, I would have preferred they drop the Alessa/cult aspect. Travis and his story had a lot of potential to be deep and interesting, but I feel like in the current game we wound up getting, his story was just shoved in there because their final Alessa story was too weak. But in the end we just got two equally weak stories not complementing each other at all, resulting in a decent but pretty mediocre SH title.

Dropping Alessa/cult and focusing and fleshing out Travis instead would have indeed gone a long way for the game, I feel.

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I really don't see why they felt the need to rehash the events of the fire from Alessa's childhood, and ultimately modify the events that occurred as of the first game. In and of itself I think that if they were going to do that, that it should have been as a background, with minor interaction if any at all by the SH1 cast. Travis could have his own story that parallels what's going on, rather than completely being mixed up in all the shit.

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I think the two aspects of the story may have come about because two development teams worked on the story. Maybe one preferred a cult story, and the other added Travis's personal elements because they were more interested in SH2 style stories? I don't know for sure, but a stronger focus on eitherone would've produced a better game, IMO.

If they had explored his story a bit better, then yeah, I would have preferred they drop the Alessa/cult aspect. Travis and his story had a lot of potential to be deep and interesting, but I feel like in the current game we wound up getting, his story was just shoved in there because their final Alessa story was too weak. But in the end we just got two equally weak stories not complementing each other at all, resulting in a decent but pretty mediocre SH title.

I think you just summed up exactly how I feel about Origins.

I honestly preferred they just hadn't made it at all, but if I had to pick between a focus on Travis or a focus on Alessa, I would prefer a stronger focus on the aspect of: Travis is a man who stumbled upon Silent Hill, and is witnessing a horrible ritual that he is helpless to stop. They could've given him a real reason to continue to pursue Alessa, but there never seemed to be much of a suggestion that he truly wanted to stop what was happening to the town. It just seemed to be more of a, "Oh, let's just follow this little girl who I know nothing about all over this weird town." If they had given Travis a real motive to stop what was happening, it may have made for a much more interesting game. I also would've liked to see them spend more time with Travis and the manifestation of his "dark side" (The Butcher), but as it turns out, that was just a ho-hum subplot that ended with a lackluster boss battle.

There are plenty of ways in which Origins could have been a better game, scrapping a cult for a Travis centered plot line, plus a few odd characters drawn to Silent Hill ala Silent Hill 2 would be one of them.

But, then they couldnâ€™t call it â€œOriginsâ€. Instead, we could also scrap the Travis storyline, and replace him with a past-less character. The focus could be on the cult, its history, beliefs, traditions and relations with in it, and more importantly the relationships between SH1 characters, mainly Alessa and Dahlia. We could have also learned more about the Gillespie family history in general.

Either of this scenarios could have been short enough for the PSP platform and better then what we've got. They tried to go both ways, but with limited time and with limited space, thatâ€™s where they messed up. You cannot tell two storylines compellingly in an hour and half of gameplay.

Ideally, the Brits would have worked on it from the start, and it wouldnâ€™t be meant for PSP. More gameplay time would give us enough time to develop both stories.

Make it a battle between Dahlia and Alessa as they both try to use Travis as their pawn. Alessa by showing him the parallels between their childhood stories and Dahlia by lying her ass off as she usually does, saying that Alessa is only feeding on his emotional pain and is showing him lies. That way, weâ€™d have enough Travis angst, and enough Alessa/Dahlia.

I thought that Travis saving Alessa from the fire was a great concept, but after that the cult story mostly just doesn't hold together. Before we got Travis saving Alessa, it was assumed that the fire was what caused Cheryl to be created, as Alessa couldn't die if half of her soul wasn't inside her. But Origins threw that concept out, and so had to come up with another idea for the creation of Cheryl, and what happened kinda didn't work very well, espeically since Travis ditches Alessa at the end so that she can just be captured by the cult again.

I think that Travis's story was good enough, although the butcher was an obvious Pyramid Head rip-off IMO. I think that the main problem was that there were too few scenes with Lisa, Dr. Kaufman, and especially Dahlia, and those scenes were too short to make the cult part of the story truly compelling. Lisa had a couple good moments and Dr. Kaufman was an ass. Otherwise ... nothing. Really, the relationship between Dahlia and Alessa needed to be explored, because in my opinion the scenes in Silent Hill 1 between Alessa and Dahlia are the most emotional. And a scene displaying how Dr. Kaufman manipulated Lisa would've been great. And Alessa could've, you know, said something.

I still think Origins was a great game, but more for the level design than anything else.

Well, I think that it would lose a lot of its, um.. I guess you could say, substance or base? It wouldn't really be a mix of occult and subconscious without it, and it would also leave a major hole in the story about the Order. Those are just my thoughts though.

_________________When the radio began to static up... I... I think I pooped myself.

Travis' story is strong enough to stand on it's own, and the majority of the game's enemies and bosses all come from his own psyche, not Alessa. I always admired how this one merged the Silent Hill 1/3 'occult' world with the Silent Hill 2 'subconscious' world but I recently started to think, does Alessa's story even need to be there? Obviously it couldn't be called Origins, but I found most of the weaker ideas in the game to be the ones linking it to SH1 - particularly the demon boss etc.

Could this have been "Silent Hill 2.5"? Would you have liked it better if it was?

Although you're right about what you said as I kinda saw it better if it was a SILENT HILL 5 (since it came after SH4:THE ROOM) so it would've been a great new story about travis but there are points of the story that seemed like couldn't be connected together without Alessa interfering, like why would he stop at Silent Hill ? and when he saw Alessa n did stop there he tried to help her and then his story kicked in and that was really fun. but what I hated about the game and SH1 game is the Flauros thing and the final battle, I mean it just doesn't feel like Silent Hill, this magic thing and those lights ...etc. they're not so fitting with the weather, it would've been really great if they used different effects and animations to show the effect of the flauros and the summoning ..etc.

Actually I felt it focused too much on Travis and not enough on Alessa especially being Silent Hill Origins which was intended to tell more about pre SH1.

As for Alessa herself the only real thing I disliked about her was her being presented unnecessarily dark in her dealing with Travis despite her having good intentions for him. Her design was fine and she looked generic in SH1 to begin with anyway.

She looked fine in the PSP version, but her the redesign of her and Travis's face in the PS2 version looked ugly. But the rest of the cast especially Lisa looked better in the PS2 version.

But it presented some memorable moments. The beginning of the game was top notch especially with Travis getting Alessa out of the house. Only thing I would have wanted different was the rescue of Alessa being a bit longer. As it takes less than 2-3 minutes to rush in and get her. Makes the house being on fire seem much less imposing.

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